The mad, twisted tale of the electric scooter craze

For weeks, I’d been seeing trashed electric scooters on the streets of San Francisco. So I asked a group of friends if any of them had seen people vandalizing the dockless vehicles since they were scattered across the city a couple of months ago.

The answer was an emphatic “yes.”

One
friend saw a guy walking down the street kicking over every scooter he
came across. Another saw a rider pull up to a curb as the handlebars and
headset became fully detached. My friend figures someone had messed
with the screws or cabling so the scooter would come apart on purpose.

A scroll through Reddit, Instagram and Twitter showed me photos of scooters — owned by Bird, Lime and Spin — smeared in feces, hanging from trees, hefted into trashcans and tossed into the San Francisco Bay.

It’s no wonder Lime scooters’ alarm isn’t just a loud beep, but a
narc-like battle cry that literally says, “Unlock me to ride, or I’ll
call the police.”

San Francisco’s scooter phenomenon has taken on many names: Scootergeddon, Scooterpocalypse and Scooter Wars. It all started when the three companies spread hundreds of their dockless, rentable e-scooters across city the same week at the end of March — without any warning to local residents or lawmakers.

Almost instantly, first-time riders began zooming down sidewalks at 15 mph, swerving between pedestrians and ringing the small bells attached to the handlebars. And they left the vehicles wherever they felt like it: scooters cluttered walkways and storefronts, jammed up bike lanes, and blocked bike racks and wheelchair accesses.

The three companies all say they’re solving a “last-mile”
transportation problem, giving commuters an easy and convenient way to
zip around the city while helping ease road congestion and smog. They
call it the latest in a long line of disruptive businesses that aim to
change the way we live.

The scooters have definitely changed how some people live.

I
learned the Wild West looks friendly compared to scooter land. In San
Francisco’s world of these motorized vehicles, there’s backstabbing,
tweaker chop shops and intent to harm.

“The angry people, they
were angry,” says Michael Ghadieh, who owns electric bicycle shop, SF
Wheels, and has repaired hundreds of the scooters. “People cut cables,
flatten tires, they were thrown in the Bay. Someone was out there
physically damaging these things.”

Yikes! Clipped brakes

SF
Wheels is located on a quaint street in a quintessential San Francisco
neighborhood. Called Cole Valley, the area is lined with Victorian
homes, upscale cafes and views of the city’s famous Mount Sutro. SF
Wheels sells and rents electric bicycles for $20 per hour, mostly to
tourists who want to see Golden Gate Park on two wheels.

In
March, one of the scooter companies called Ghadieh to tell him they were
about to launch in the city and were looking for people to help with
repairs. Ghadieh said he was game. He wouldn’t disclose the name of the
company because of agreements he signed.

Now he admits he didn’t quite know what he was getting into.

Days
after the scooter startups dropped their vehicles on an unsuspecting
San Francisco, SF Wheels became so crammed with broken scooters that it
was hard to walk through the small, tidy shop. Scooters lined the
sidewalk outside, filled the doorway and crowded the mechanic’s
workspace. The backyard had a heap of scooters nearly six-feet tall,
Ghadieh told me.

His bike techs were so busy that Ghadieh had to hire three more
mechanics. SF Wheels was fixing 75 to 100 scooters per day. Ghadieh
didn’t say how much the shop was making per scooter fix.

“The
repairs were fast and easy on some and longer on others,” Ghadieh said.
“It’d depend on whether it was wear-and-tear or whether it was
physically damaged by someone out there, some madman.”

Some of
the scooters, which cost around $500 off the shelf, came in completely
vandalized — everything from chopped wires for the controller (aka the
brain) to detached handlebars to bent forks. Several even showed up with
clipped brake cables.

I asked Ghadieh if the scooters still work without brakes.

“It
will work, yes,” he said. “It will go forward, but you just cannot
stop. Whoever is causing that is making the situation dangerous for some
riders.”

Especially in a city with lots of hills.

Ghadieh said his crew worked diligently for about six weeks,
repairing an estimated 1,000 scooters. But then, about three weeks ago,
work dried up. Ghadieh had to lay off the mechanics he’d hired and his
shop is back to focusing on electric bicycles.

“Now, there’s
literally nothing,” he said. “There’s a change of face with the company.
I’m not exactly sure what happened. … They decided to do it
differently.”

The likely change? The electric scooter company
probably decided to outsource repairs to gig workers, rather than rely
on agreements with shops.

That’s gig as in freelancers looking
to pick up part-time work, like Uber and Lyft drivers. And like Nick
Abouzeid. By day, Abouzeid works in marketing for the startup AngelList.
A few weeks ago, he got an email from Bird inviting him to be a scooter
mechanic. The message told Abouzeid he could earn $20 for each scooter
repair, once he’d completed an online training. He signed up, took the
classes and is ready to start.

“These scooters aren’t
complicated. They’re cheap scooters from China,” Abouzeid said. “The
repairs are anything from adjusting a brake to fixing a flat tire to
adding stickers that have fallen off a Bird.”

Bird declined to
comment specifically on its maintenance program, but its spokesman
Kenneth Baer did say, “Bird has a network of trained chargers and
mechanics who operate as independent contractors.”

All of Lime’s
mechanics, on the other hand, are part of the company’s operations and
maintenance team that repairs the scooters and ensures they’re safe for
riders. Spin uses a mix of gig workers and contract mechanics, like what
Ghadieh was doing.

Gaming the system

Electric scooters are, well, electric. That means they need to be plugged into an outlet for four to five hours before they can transport people, who rent them for $1 plus 15 cents for every minute of riding time.

Bird, Spin and Lime all partially rely on gig workers to keep their fleets juiced up.

Each company has a different app that shows scooters with low or dead batteries. Anyone with a driver’s license and car can sign up for the app and become a charger. These drivers roam the streets, picking up scooters and taking them home to be charged.

“It creates this amazing kind of gig economy,” Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden, who is a former Uber and Lyft executive, told me in April. “It’s kind of like a game of Pokemon Go for them, where they go around and try to find and gobble up as many Birds as they can.”

Theoretically,
all scooters are supposed to be off city streets by nightfall when it’s
illegal to ride them. That’s when the chargers are unleashed. To get
paid, they have to get the vehicles back out on the street in specified
locations before 7 a.m. the next day. Bird supplies the charging cables
— only three at a time, but those who’ve been in the business longer
can get more cables.

“I don’t know the fascination with all of these companies using gig workers to charge and repair,” said Harry Campbell, who runs a popular gig worker blog called The Rideshare Guy. “But they’re all in, they’re all doing it.”

One of the reasons some companies use gig workers is to avoid costs like extra labor, gasoline and electricity. Bird, Spin and Lime have managed to convince investors they’re onto something. Between the three of them they’ve raised $255 million in funding. Bird is rumored to be raising another $150 million from one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms, Sequoia, which could put the company’s value at $1 billion. That’s a lot for an electric scooter disruptor.

Lime pays $12 to charge each
scooter and Spin pays $5; both companies also deploy their own
operations teams for charging. Bird has a somewhat different system. It
pays anywhere from $5 to $25 to charge its scooters, depending on the
city and the location of the dead scooter. The harder the vehicle is to
find and the longer it’s been off the radar, the higher the “bounty.”

Abouzeid, who’s moonlighted as a Bird charger for the past two months, said he’s only found a $25 scooter once.

But some chargers have devised a way to game the system. They call it hoarding.

“They’ll
literally go around picking up Birds and putting them in the back of
their car,” Campbell said. “And then they wait until the bounties on
them go up and up and up.”

Bird has gotten wise to these
tactics. It sent an email to all chargers last week warning them that if
it sniffs out this kind of activity, those hoarders will be barred from
the app.

“We feel like this is a big step forward in fixing
some of the most painful issues we’ve been hearing,” Bird wrote in the
email, which was seen by CNET.

Tweaker chop shops

Hoarding
and vandalism aren’t the only problems for electric scooter companies.
There’s also theft. While the vehicles have GPS tracking, once the
battery fully dies they go off the app’s map.

“Every homeless person has like three scooters now,” Ghadieh said. “They take the brains out, the logos off and they literally hotwire it.”

I’ve seen scooters stashed at tent cities around San Francisco. Photos of people extracting the batteries have been posted on Twitter and Reddit. Rumor has it the batteries have a resale price of about $50 on the street, but there doesn’t appear to be a huge market for them on eBay or Craigslist, according to my quick survey.

Bird, Lime and Spin
all said trashed and stolen scooters aren’t as big a problem as you’d
think. When the companies launch in a new city, they said they tend to
see higher theft and vandalism rates but then that calms down.

“We
have received a few reports of theft and vandalism, but that’s the
nature of the business,” said Spin co-founder and President Euwyn Poon.
“When you have a product that’s available for public consumption, you
account for that.”

Dockless, rentable scooters are now taking
over cities across the US — from Denver to Atlanta to Washington, DC.
Bird’s scooters are available in at least 10 cities with Scottsdale,
Arizona, being the site of its most recent launch.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, regulators have been working to
get rules in place to make sure riders drive safely and the companies
abide by the law.

New regulations to limit the number of scooters are set to go into effect in the city on June 4. To comply, scooter companies have to clear the streets of all their vehicles while the authorities process their permits. That’s expected to take about a month.

And just like that, scooters will go out
the way they came in — appearing and disappearing from one day to the
next — leaving in their wake the chargers, mechanics, vandals and
people hotwiring the things to get a free ride around town.